I'd love to start talking more about making a living as an independent hacker/creator but I've sometimes felt a vibe that this topic isn't so welcome on the Fediverse.
Any thoughts on the best way to approach this?
My goal would be to share what I've learned to help others do the same!
@alcinnz This is post is just plainly stupid. Regardless you like bitcoin or not, Bitcoin is not a digital currency in that sense.
The goal is to make digital cash (or digital gold, in bitcoin).
You might like the solution or not, but you should agree on the problem of a central authority, and tracking. If you pay with cash, there's no way to know who you paid to => that's private.
The digital currency the post talks about is controlled, and tracks where you spend. That's what bitcoin solves.
@alcinnz In fact, bitcoin (and some other cryptos) are an answer to the digital currencies that the post talks about.
Those digital currencies the post mentions are the ones that enable massive tracking of users, prevent people from receiving payments for dubious reasons, and so on.
@alcinnz Yes, I agree on the blockchain based solutions being a problem, but I believe the criticism has to be on point. This post is just missing the point.
Even the cryptocurrency people have some good ideas and good points, and just not spending the time to understand them but criticize them, I believe, is just counter productive.
Cryptocurrency people are not stupid. They might be wrong, but they are not stupid. Certainly, they are more awake than the author of the post :)
@alcinnz I try to avoid choosing sides when it comes to technology and complex issues because I think that's the answer that an intellectually poor person would take.
In general, I always try to do the opposite that I feel forced to do, mostly because those that are interested on forcing me to something are not the ones that wish me good.
In the case of cryptos, I don't like them, in general. But I have studied them (mostly bitcoin) and they have hugely interesting details we could reuse.
@alcinnz Just rejecting it or despising it is not going to give you anything but internet points ("oh! look, this guy is in my side!"). Stopping and spending the time to understand might give you knowledge.
If those are the things I have to choose between, I will certainly go for the second.
:)
PS: I'm just elaborating, from what I know about you, you are also a deep thinker. I'm not trying to nag you or anything like that.
@mntmn yeah... git docs are weird if you don't get the terminology... i recommend the git-book. Everything is very well explained there.
Maybe it helps? https://book.git-scm.com/book/en/v2
@janneke@civodul@stikonas Using Musl is a very good compromise, too.
It's supereasy to read, and many of the problems we have fixed in meslibc we used musl as a reference so... Somehow meslibc is more similar to musl now. If we continue to do so, maybe it will become musl at some point hehe.
@civodul@janneke As @stikonas says, musl is just another package.
Why does it feel right to add TinyCC but we prefer to avoid Musl?
In the same way it would be great to use MesCC to build GCC4.6.4 but that's not possible right now for two reasons: it would take forever to build and it needs many improvements in MesCC to make this possible.
Same thing happens with MeslibC. MeslibC is just very problematic at this very moment.
@civodul@janneke@stikonas I shared in the past that it uses file descriptors as FILE structures, and that makes impossible to check if FILEs where opened correctly, it's not able to ungetc more than once and many things more. This makes binutils (not even GCC) impossible to build.
We need to rewrite many parts of MeslibC to make it able to build binutils, and probably way more for GCC.
@civodul@janneke@stikonas On the other hand, using Musl lets us avoid many intermediate steps and removes also many packages from the chain, as we can build more modern software directly.
It simplifies the chain, and that might doing more good than bad.
I spent most of the day getting comfortable with Guile and the basics of Guix services.
Followed the "perfect hacking setup" manual section (I'm lucky, I'm using Emacs). Geiser is okay-ish, but fails a lot of times (can't jump to definition in g-expressions for instance). Overall, the builtin yasnippets, and paredit are good and useful, geiser fails to jump to definition too many times to be really useful.
I have a fully functional sway/pipewire/xdg-desktop-portal setup. Costed me quite some headaches.
Guix home is super nice and definitely more integrated than home-manager.
I migrated ~60% of my laptop NixOS configuration. The remaining 40% are going to be pretty painful to migrate, Guix is currently lacking some features to do so (writers, secret management). I'll probably have to write the missing features to continue the migration, but I'm not comfortable enough with Guile/Guix to do so yet.
I packaged my first package (power-profiles-daemon) and wrote a service for that.
I really like the Guix service system. A lot more than the NixOS module system.
Tomorrow, I'll have to face my nemesis: mailing-list-powered patches. I'm 6 commits ahead of my Guix channel, it's time to reduce the stack and start cleaning/upstreaming the changes.
I'm not in love with Guile yet. Part of it probably comes from my inexperience, using it is still painful and slows me down a lot.
I hit a massive roadblock at some point: the guile error message was lying to me. I had a module with an error in it, and instead of throwing an error message, Guile was lying to me and telling me I was not loading this module, and giving me a hint explaining me how to load the module. But, I was already loading the module!! Gazlighted by the interpreter :D
Took me a good 2h before realizing the interpreter was lying to me. I need to find a minimal reproducer to send to the email list.
Massive kudos to @ekaitz_zarraga who helped me in the process :)
